Thursday, June 10, 2010

Apple quietly announces the Safari Developer Program

Apple quietly announced the Safari Developer Program late this afternoon. It's a free program that provides developers with "tools and resources" needed to create extensions for Safari.

You can add buttons to the Safari toolbar, create bars of your own, modify the behavior and appearance of webpages, and more - all with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

This is an interesting move by Apple who's browser has only allowed plug-ins. Does this mark a move for Apple to compete more with Google's Chrome?

There are a couple of tools that I use with Firefox for dev work and Safari 4 and Safari 5 have rather nice dev tools built-in. But I can see where other's would want to create a custom toolbar, a la Google, Yahoo, etc.

Do you use extensions in Firefox or Chrome? If so if which ones? And if they were offered for Safari 5 would you use them there as well? Would you even use Safari 5 if you aren't already? What do you think about Apple's announcement?